OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Synthesis in MRI using an encoder-decoder U-NET
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose generating synthetic multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions on MRI images with the final aim to improve the performance of supervised machine learning algorithms, therefore avoiding the problem of the lack of available ground truth. We propose a two-input two-output fully convolutional neural network model for MS lesion synthesis in MRI images. The lesion information is encoded as discrete binary intensity level masks passed to the model and stacked with the input images. The model is trained end-to-end without the need for manually annotating the lesions in the training set. We then perform the generation of synthetic lesions on healthy images via registration of patient images, which are subsequently used for data augmentation to increase the performance for supervised MS lesion detection algorithms. Our pipeline is evaluated on MS patient data from an in-house clinical dataset and the public ISBI2015 challenge dataset. The evaluation is based on measuring the similarities between the real and the synthetic images as well as in terms of lesion detection performance by segmenting both the original and synthetic images individually using a state-of-the-art segmentation framework. We also demonstrate the usage of synthetic MS lesions generated on healthy images as data augmentation. We analyze a scenario of limited training data (one-image training) to demonstrate the effect of the data augmentation on both datasets. Our results significantly show the effectiveness of the usage of synthetic MS lesion images. For the ISBI2015 challenge, our one-image model trained using only a single image plus the synthetic data augmentation strategy showed a performance similar to that of other CNN methods that were fully trained using the entire training set, yielding a comparable human expert rater performance
On Multi-Cell Uplink-Downlink Duality with Treating Inter-Cell Interference as Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the information-theoretic optimality of treating inter-cell interference as noise in downlink cellular networks modeled as Gaussian interfering broadcast channels. Establishing a new uplink-downlink duality, we cast the problem in Gaussian interfering broadcast channels to that in Gaussian interfering multiple access channels, and characterize an achievable GDoF region under power control and treating inter-cell interference as (Gaussian) noise. We then identify conditions under which this achievable GDoF region is optimal.
One-Shot Perfect Secret Key Agreement for Finite Linear Sources
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We consider a non-asymptotic (one-shot) version of the multiterminal secret key agreement problem on a finite linear source model. In this model, the observation of each terminal is a linear function of an underlying random vector composed of finitely many i.i.d. uniform random variables. Restricting the public discussion to be a linear function of the terminals' observations, we obtain a characterization of the communication complexity (minimum number of symbols of public discussion) of generating a secret key of maximum length. The minimum discussion is achieved by a non-interactive protocol in which each terminal first does a linear processing of its own private observations, following which the terminals all execute a discussion-optimal communication-for-omniscience protocol. The secret key is finally obtained as a linear function of the vector of all observations.
The Security of Smart Buildings: a Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Smart Buildings are networks of connected devices and software in charge of automatically managing and controlling several building functions such as HVAC, fire alarms, lighting, shading and more. These systems evolved from mostly electronic and mechanical elements to complex systems relying on IT and wireless technologies and networks. This exposes smart buildings to new risks and threats that need to be enumerated and addressed. Research efforts have been done in several areas related to security in smart buildings but a clear overview of the research field is missing. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review that provides a thorough understanding of the state of the art in research on the security of smart buildings. We found that the field of smart buildings security is growing significantly in complexity due to the many protocols introduced recently and that the research community is already studying. We also found an important lack of empirical evaluations, though evaluations on testbeds and real systems seems to be growing. Finally, we found an almost complete lack of consideration of non-technical aspects, such as social, organisational, and human factors, which are crucial in this type of systems, where ownership and liability is not always clear.
EAT-NAS: Elastic Architecture Transfer for Accelerating Large-scale Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Neural architecture search (NAS) methods have been proposed to release human experts from tedious architecture engineering. However, most current methods are constrained in small-scale search due to the issue of computational resources. Meanwhile, directly applying architectures searched on small datasets to large datasets often bears no performance guarantee. This limitation impedes the wide use of NAS on large-scale tasks. To overcome this obstacle, we propose an elastic architecture transfer mechanism for accelerating large-scale neural architecture search (EAT-NAS). In our implementations, architectures are first searched on a small dataset, e.g., CIFAR-10. The best one is chosen as the basic architecture. The search process on the large dataset, e.g., ImageNet, is initialized with the basic architecture as the seed. The large-scale search process is accelerated with the help of the basic architecture. What we propose is not only a NAS method but a mechanism for architecture-level transfer. In our experiments, we obtain two final models EATNet-A and EATNet-B that achieve competitive accuracies, 74.7% and 74.2% on ImageNet, respectively, which also surpass the models searched from scratch on ImageNet under the same settings. For the computational cost, EAT-NAS takes only less than 5 days on 8 TITAN X GPUs, which is significantly less than the computational consumption of the state-of-the-art large-scale NAS methods.
The Distributive, Graded Lattice of EL Concept Descriptions and its Neighborhood Relation (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

For the description logic EL, we consider the neighborhood relation which is induced by the subsumption order, and we show that the corresponding lattice of EL concept descriptions is distributive, modular, graded, and metric. In particular, this implies the existence of a rank function as well as the existence of a distance function.
BioSEAL: In-Memory Biological Sequence Alignment Accelerator for Large-Scale Genomic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2019
Year: 2019

Genome sequences contain hundreds of millions of DNA base pairs. Finding the degree of similarity between two genomes requires executing a compute-intensive dynamic programming algorithm, such as Smith-Waterman. Traditional von Neumann architectures have limited parallelism and cannot provide an efficient solution for large-scale genomic data. Approximate heuristic methods (e.g. BLAST) are commonly used. However, they are suboptimal and still compute-intensive. In this work, we present BioSEAL, a Biological SEquence ALignment accelerator. BioSEAL is a massively parallel non-von Neumann processing-in-memory architecture for large-scale DNA and protein sequence alignment. BioSEAL is based on resistive content addressable memory, capable of energy-efficient and high-performance associative processing. We present an associative processing algorithm for entire database sequence alignment on BioSEAL and compare its performance and power consumption with state-of-art solutions. We show that BioSEAL can achieve up to 57x speedup and 156x better energy efficiency, compared with existing solutions for genome sequence alignment and protein sequence database search.
Scheduling Jobs with Random Resource Requirements in Computing Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

We consider a natural scheduling problem which arises in many distributed computing frameworks. Jobs with diverse resource requirements (e.g. memory requirements) arrive over time and must be served by a cluster of servers, each with a finite resource capacity. To improve throughput and delay, the scheduler can pack as many jobs as possible in the servers subject to their capacity constraints. Motivated by the ever-increasing complexity of workloads in shared clusters, we consider a setting where the jobs' resource requirements belong to a very large number of diverse types or, in the extreme, even infinitely many types, e.g. when resource requirements are drawn from an unknown distribution over a continuous support. The application of classical scheduling approaches that crucially rely on a predefined finite set of types is discouraging in this high (or infinite) dimensional setting. We first characterize a fundamental limit on the maximum throughput in such setting, and then develop oblivious scheduling algorithms that have low complexity and can achieve at least 1/2 and 2/3 of the maximum throughput, without the knowledge of traffic or resource requirement distribution. Extensive simulation results, using both synthetic and real traffic traces, are presented to verify the performance of our algorithms.
Supporting mixed-datatype matrix multiplication within the BLIS framework
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2019
Year: 2019

We approach the problem of implementing mixed-datatype support within the general matrix multiplication (GEMM) operation of the BLIS framework, whereby each matrix operand A, B, and C may be stored as single- or double-precision real or complex values. Another factor of complexity, whereby the computation is allowed to take place in a precision different from the storage precisions of either A or B, is also included in the discussion. We first break the problem into mostly orthogonal dimensions, considering the mixing of domains separately from mixing precisions. Support for all combinations of matrix operands stored in either the real or complex domain is mapped out by enumerating the cases and describing an implementation approach for each. Supporting all combinations of storage and computation precisions is handled by typecasting the matrices at key stages of the computation---during packing and/or accumulation, as needed. Several optional optimizations are also documented. Performance results gathered on a 56-core Marvell ThunderX2 and a 52-core Intel Xeon Platinum demonstrate that high performance is mostly preserved, with modest slowdowns incurred from unavoidable typecast instructions. The mixed-datatype implementation confirms that combinatoric intractability is avoided, with the framework relying on only two assembly microkernels to implement 128 datatype combinations.
Good Similar Patches for Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Patch-based denoising algorithms like BM3D have achieved outstanding performance. An important idea for the success of these methods is to exploit the recurrence of similar patches in an input image to estimate the underlying image structures. However, in these algorithms, the similar patches used for denoising are obtained via Nearest Neighbour Search (NNS) and are sometimes not optimal. First, due to the existence of noise, NNS can select similar patches with similar noise patterns to the reference patch. Second, the unreliable noisy pixels in digital images can bring a bias to the patch searching process and result in a loss of color fidelity in the final denoising result. We observe that given a set of good similar patches, their distribution is not necessarily centered at the noisy reference patch and can be approximated by a Gaussian component. Based on this observation, we present a patch searching method that clusters similar patch candidates into patch groups using Gaussian Mixture Model-based clustering, and selects the patch group that contains the reference patch as the final patches for denoising. We also use an unreliable pixel estimation algorithm to pre-process the input noisy images to further improve the patch searching. Our experiments show that our approach can better capture the underlying patch structures and can consistently enable the state-of-the-art patch-based denoising algorithms, such as BM3D, LPCA and PLOW, to better denoise images by providing them with patches found by our approach while without modifying these algorithms.
DeepOtsu: Document Enhancement and Binarization using Iterative Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a novel iterative deep learning framework and apply it for document enhancement and binarization. Unlike the traditional methods which predict the binary label of each pixel on the input image, we train the neural network to learn the degradations in document images and produce the uniform images of the degraded input images, which allows the network to refine the output iteratively. Two different iterative methods have been studied in this paper: recurrent refinement (RR) which uses the same trained neural network in each iteration for document enhancement and stacked refinement (SR) which uses a stack of different neural networks for iterative output refinement. Given the learned uniform and enhanced image, the binarization map can be easy to obtain by a global or local threshold. The experimental results on several public benchmark data sets show that our proposed methods provide a new clean version of the degraded image which is suitable for visualization and promising results of binarization using the global Otsu's threshold based on the enhanced images learned iteratively by the neural network.
Robust Watermarking of Neural Network with Exponential Weighting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning has been achieving top performance in many tasks. Since training of a deep learning model requires a great deal of cost, we need to treat neural network models as valuable intellectual properties. One concern in such a situation is that some malicious user might redistribute the model or provide a prediction service using the model without permission. One promising solution is digital watermarking, to embed a mechanism into the model so that the owner of the model can verify the ownership of the model externally. In this study, we present a novel attack method against watermark, query modification, and demonstrate that all of the existing watermark methods are vulnerable to either of query modification or existing attack method (model modification). To overcome this vulnerability, we present a novel watermarking method, exponential weighting. We experimentally show that our watermarking method achieves high verification performance of watermark even under a malicious attempt of unauthorized service providers, such as model modification and query modification, without sacrificing the predictive performance of the neural network model.
Protein Classification using Machine Learning and Statistical Techniques: A Comparative Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In recent era prediction of enzyme class from an unknown protein is one of the challenging tasks in bioinformatics. Day to day the number of proteins is increases as result the prediction of enzyme class gives a new opportunity to bioinformatics scholars. The prime objective of this article is to implement the machine learning classification technique for feature selection and predictions also find out an appropriate classification technique for function prediction. In this article the seven different classification technique like CRT, QUEST, CHAID, C5.0, ANN (Artificial Neural Network), SVM and Bayesian has been implemented on 4368 protein data that has been extracted from UniprotKB databank and categories into six different class. The proteins data is high dimensional sequence data and contain a maximum of 48 features.To manipulate the high dimensional sequential protein data with different classification technique, the SPSS has been used as an experimental tool. Different classification techniques give different results for every model and shows that the data are imbalanced for class C4, C5 and C6. The imbalanced data affect the performance of model. In these three classes the precision and recall value is very less or negligible. The experimental results highlight that the C5.0 classification technique accuracy is more suited for protein feature classification and predictions. The C5.0 classification technique gives 95.56% accuracy and also gives high precision and recall value. Finally, we conclude that the features that is selected can be used for function prediction.
Generative Adversarial Classifier for Handwriting Characters Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) receive great attentions recently due to its excellent performance in image generation, transformation, and super-resolution. However, GAN has rarely been studied and trained for classification, leading that the generated images may not be appropriate for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Classifier (GAC) particularly for low-resolution Handwriting Character Recognition. Specifically, involving additionally a classifier in the training process of normal GANs, GAC is calibrated for learning suitable structures and restored characters images that benefits the classification. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve remarkable performance in handwriting characters 8x super-resolution, approximately 10% and 20% higher than the present state-of-the-art methods respectively on benchmark data CASIA-HWDB1.1 and MNIST.
Micro- and Macro-Level Churn Analysis of Large-Scale Mobile Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

As mobile devices become more and more popular, mobile gaming has emerged as a promising market with billion-dollar revenues. A variety of mobile game platforms and services have been developed around the world. A critical challenge for these platforms and services is to understand the churn behavior in mobile games, which usually involves churn at micro level (between an app and a specific user) and macro level (between an app and all its users). Accurate micro-level churn prediction and macro-level churn ranking will benefit many stakeholders such as game developers, advertisers, and platform operators. In this paper, we present the first large-scale churn analysis for mobile games that supports both micro-level churn prediction and macro-level churn ranking. For micro-level churn prediction, in view of the common limitations of the state-of-the-art methods built upon traditional machine learning models, we devise a novel semi-supervised and inductive embedding model that jointly learns the prediction function and the embedding function for user-app relationships. We model these two functions by deep neural networks with a unique edge embedding technique that is able to capture both contextual information and relationship dynamics. We also design a novel attributed random walk technique that takes into consideration both topological adjacency and attribute similarities. To address macro-level churn ranking, we propose to construct a relationship graph with estimated micro-level churn probabilities as edge weights and adapt link analysis algorithms on the graph. We devise a simple algorithm SimSum and adapt two more advanced algorithms PageRank and HITS. The performance of our solutions for the two-level churn analysis problems is evaluated on real-world data collected from the Samsung Game Launcher platform.
Learning Spatial Pyramid Attentive Pooling in Image Synthesis and Image-to-Image Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Image synthesis and image-to-image translation are two important generative learning tasks. Remarkable progress has been made by learning Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)~\cite{goodfellow2014generative} and cycle-consistent GANs (CycleGANs)~\cite{zhu2017unpaired} respectively. This paper presents a method of learning Spatial Pyramid Attentive Pooling (SPAP) which is a novel architectural unit and can be easily integrated into both generators and discriminators in GANs and CycleGANs. The proposed SPAP integrates Atrous spatial pyramid~\cite{chen2018deeplab}, a proposed cascade attention mechanism and residual connections~\cite{he2016deep}. It leverages the advantages of the three components to facilitate effective end-to-end generative learning: (i) the capability of fusing multi-scale information by ASPP; (ii) the capability of capturing relative importance between both spatial locations (especially multi-scale context) or feature channels by attention; (iii) the capability of preserving information and enhancing optimization feasibility by residual connections. Coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse SPAP are studied and intriguing attention maps are observed in both tasks. In experiments, the proposed SPAP is tested in GANs on the Celeba-HQ-128 dataset~\cite{karras2017progressive}, and tested in CycleGANs on the Image-to-Image translation datasets including the Cityscape dataset~\cite{cordts2016cityscapes}, Facade and Aerial Maps dataset~\cite{zhu2017unpaired}, both obtaining better performance.
Complexity and expressivity of propositional dynamic logics with finitely many variables
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate the complexity of satisfiability for finite-variable fragments of propositional dynamic logics. We consider three formalisms belonging to three representative complexity classes, broadly understood,---regular PDL, which is EXPTIME-complete, PDL with intersection, which is 2EXPTIME-complete, and PDL with parallel composition, which is undecidable. We show that, for each of these logics, the complexity of satisfiability remains unchanged even if we only allow as inputs formulas built solely out of propositional constants, i.e. without propositional variables. Moreover, we show that this is a consequence of the richness of the expressive power of variable-free fragments: for all the logics we consider, such fragments are as semantically expressive as entire logics. We conjecture that this is representative of PDL-style, as well as closely related, logics.
Ergodic MIMO Mutual Information: Twenty Years After Emre Telatar
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In the celebrated work of Emre Telatar in the year 1999 (14274 citations to date), it was shown that the expected value of the mutual information \begin{equation*} \mathrm{I} = \ln\det\left( \mathbf{I}_m + \frac{1}{t} \mathbf{HH}^{\dagger} \right) \end{equation*} of an $m\times n$ MIMO Rayleigh channel matrix $\mathbf{H}$ with a SNR $1/t$ can be represented as an integral involving Laguerre polynomials. We show, in this work, that Telatar's integral representation can be explicitly evaluated to a finite sum of the form \begin{equation*} \mathbb{E}\!\left[\mathrm{I}\right]=\sum_{k=0}^{n+m-3}a_{k}t^{k}+\rm e^{t}~\text{Ei}(-t)\sum_{k=0}^{n+m-2}b_{k}t^{k},, \end{equation*} where $\text{Ei}(-t)$ is the exponential integral and $a_{k}$, $b_{k}$ are known constants that do not dependent on $t$. The renewed interest in this classical information theory problem came from, quite surprisingly, the recent development in quantum information theory.